Facebook: Your Personal Data is a Trade Secret

An anonymous reader writes "An Austrian group called Europe versus Facebook has so far made 22 complaints regarding the social network's practices. In the process, the organization has stumbled upon an important tidbit: Facebook says it is not required to give you a copy of some of your personal data if it deems doing so would adversely affect its trade secrets or intellectual property."

Comments

Shock Horror

[Cryacin]

Of course they'll tell you that. In fact, haven't you realised? You ARE their intellectual property. All you iSheep, Twits and FacePalmers. Go on, put your private life on teh intertubes for all to see. Check in with FourSquare to become the mayor of burger king to get a 10% discount on your next piece of crap for lunch, and watch your insurance company make a silent note. Write on your wall about your cool new Nike Football shoes, and watch targeted advertising appear to you for other football related products.

The herd is a goldmine, ripe for the picking.

Re:Shock Horror

[Cryacin]

Keep on drinking the Kool-Aid then chum. It starts with the anonymous herd, and ends with the individual when they become interesting. How much do you think your soon to be ex-wife's divorce lawyer would like to pay to get you fully profiled and sniff out any dirt on you? Of course it can be done via conventional means, it's just much quicker and more efficient online.

Re:Shock Horror

[Anonymous Coward]

Divorce lawyer?

Dude, there's more .. we've all seen the stories about how employers, law enforcement, and spy agencies are using online profiles to dig up dirt on people.

And even if you're really clean or square, it doesn't take much for someone to put 2+2 together and come up with 5 or 6 or 10.

Let's face it, there are a lot of bigots out there - I'm one of them. If I see on your profile that you're a Mormon or Born Again Christian - I don't want to have anything to do with you nor do I want to hire you. Against the law? Sorry, you don't have the skills for the job. It never had anything to do with your religious preferences.

Pastafarians Rule - as long as you believe that Lasagna was THE profit to save us!

Re:Shock Horror

[msauve]

Heck, if you post publicly, you're everyone's intellectual property. At least you know Facebook is keeping info, but how many others are scraping Facebook and collecting info, and you don't even know?

Re:Shock Horror

[Daniel Dvorkin]

All you iSheep, Twits and FacePalmers.

He says, on a public web forum.

Re:Shock Horror

[Anonymous Coward]

And you wonder why the average person dismisses you Oh My Privacy! people as lunatics?

Re:Shock Horror

[artor3]

Write on your wall about your cool new Nike Football shoes, and watch targeted advertising appear to you for other football related products.

Why is this bad? I'd rather see ads for things I like and might consider buying than scattershot ads for shit I'd never use.

Check in with FourSquare to become the mayor of burger king to get a 10% discount on your next piece of crap for lunch, and watch your insurance company make a silent note.

Why is this bad? I eat healthy, and am healthier for it. Why should I have to subsidize the lard-asses who eat at BK every day?

You ARE their intellectual property.

Now that's just scary-sounding gibberish.

All you iSheep, Twits and FacePalmers.

You seem to be fond of insulting labels. Here's some for you: paranoid, arrogant, condescending.

And for the record, I don't use Apple products, or Twitter, or Facebook. But that's because I don't want to, not because I'm afraid that they'll find out about my super-secret love of oatmeal.

Re:Shock Horror

[shentino]

And with such information easily available, employers are even depending on it and starting to thumb their noses at wiseass technophobes that know better than to whore themselves out to social networks.

Re:Shock Horror

[xyourfacekillerx]

Best post ever.

Re:Shock Horror

[betterunixthanunix]

Indeed, although there is not much personal information on Slashdot. The problem is not that people have public lives, it is that Facebook greatly expands the scope of what is "public" while greatly diminishing the scope of what is "private." The information Facebook collects is much broader in scope than Slashdot, and extends beyond what people actively post on Facebook.

There is also the matter that supposedly private messages on Facebook are not really private at all, a classic case of the "third party server" problem. Unlike email, for which there are well-developed (but rarely used) methods of keeping private messages private, Facebook is designed to thwart such efforts (e.g. to encrypt an email, I can just hit a checkbox, assuming keys have been set up; to encrypt a Facebook message, I have to manually invoke a cryptosystem, copy and paste, and so forth -- a pain even for technically competent users). For most people, the "privacy" issue on Facebook is related to what their friends, coworkers, and potential future contacts can see -- very few people give any thought to the amount of information that Facebook itself has, and for many Facebook has become the primary means of communication.

Re:Shock Horror

[Anonymous Coward]

Jesus. There's a reason people put their information online: They don't care who sees it. This isn't some evil hidden plan of FB's. It's out there in broad daylight waving its arms around screaming. Not everyone values their privacy as much as you do. If you don't like the control you'd be giving FB by using it, then don't use it.

Re:Shock Horror

[Alien Being]

Don't waste your time explaining it. Let 'em post. Let 'em get facefucked.

Re:Shock Horror

[wmac1]

Brave anonymous coward, is that you?

Re:Shock Horror

[Anonymous Coward]

Because we all know your real name is wmac1, numbnuts.

Re:Shock Horror

[Anonymous Coward]

But on one day the FBI stands in your bedroom with a swat team to take you to an undisclosed location for questioning because you just happen to fit a profile they have compiled based on messages and personal information you so happily provided to Facebook.
You just happen to have a middle-eastern sounding name and mentioned that "Nike's new shoes are tha bomb and it will be an explosive summer for trends like these".

Re:Shock Horror

[Archangel Michael]

The problem is not that people have public lives, it is that the INTERNET greatly expands the scope of what is "public" while greatly diminishing the scope of what is "private.

FTFY

Re:Shock Horror

[davester666]

They don't have to scrape Facebook to get your info. For the right price, Facebook lets them peek under the covers...

Re:Shock Horror

[dgatwood]

Why is this bad? I'd rather see ads for things I like and might consider buying than scattershot ads for shit I'd never use.

If only it were actually that good. Every time I see an ad for a company whose products compete with products made by my employer (that I thus almost certainly wouldn't even consider buying), I conclude that they must not be doing much more than a trivial keyword search (and they know who my employer is, so that's just a Facepalm right there).

And as that satellite fell out of orbit a couple of weeks ago, I was summarizing a bunch of random Twitter feeds and news reports on my Facebook feed. As a result, I was seeing all sorts of bizarre ads related to all the cities that I mentioned, like "Travel to Hawaii", followed by "Travel to Ontario".... Completely and totally out to lunch.

Of course, if you asked me what kinds of products I buy more than once in any given year, you'd get the following list:

• Frozen food
• Restaurant food
• Milk
• Hot cocoa mix
• Cashews
• Chocolate
• Clothing (some years)
• Shoes (some years)
• Books
• Movies
• Spare hard drives
• Flash drives (some years)
• DV tapes (some years)
• Camera-related gear
• Audio-related gear
• Gasoline
• Copy paper

And that would be the end of the list. If you're advertising anything that's not on that list, it's noise. Given that (with the exception of movies) almost none of the products on the list are regularly advertised on pretty much any website, web advertisements rarely have any real impact on my buying habits. Then again, as the sort of person who will spend three hours browsing Amazon reviews before buying a blender, and the sort of person who mostly buys twentieth-run movies from the $5.99 bin instead of new releases, I'm not sure they'd affect me much even if they covered the products I buy regularly.

The kind of advertisement that does affect me, if you can call it that, is word-of-mouth advertisement. Specifically, if you make a good product, and people give it consistently good reviews, I'm more likely to buy your product. If you make a s**tty product that falls apart in six months, I'm more likely to call up a manufacturer in China and go into business against you (which isn't very likely to happen at all, but is still a heck of a lot more likely than me buying your junk product).

In the end, most advertising involves trying to trick people into buying products that they don't need, that don't do what they want, solely because somebody gave them the idea. With the exception of commodity products, it has minimal real-world impact on intelligent buyers except to make somebody aware of a product that they otherwise would not have known about.

The ad makes customers aware of the existence of new products, which means potential customers think, "I know a product that does that," when they need to do something. The problem is that most conscientious consumers then go and search Amazon to find the best product in that category, which basically means that your ad didn't buy you a sale; it bought the industry a sale, maybe, assuming that the person would not have done that search without the ad (which is probably not a valid assumption in most cases).

At least Amazon's "People who bought this also bought" feature actually does a passable job at identifying things that might be interesting to me. It has the advantage of actually knowing the things that I buy. A website like Facebook basically has no prayer.

Re:Shock Horror

[gl4ss]

well, the thing is, there's a reason there's the "europe" in the complaining groups name.

they're required to give you a copy of the records. sure, they can try to make a mint with them - it's not fb's loss when it leads to no sales, it's the stupid advertisers loss. but I guess a lot of that is problematic for fb as they don't have actual records, more like an ever living live record. it's pretty easy to target advertisements just based on what you were served on that page push, but keeping a record of that.. well, it's more problematic. I doubt if facebook even knows what they know, so it is a genuine legal problem for them.

btw I'd love to get some burger king action but damn, they don't have any burger kings here :(.

Re:Shock Horror

[cheaphomemadeacid]

sleepdotters? ;P

Re:Shock Horror

[Anonymous Coward]

Check in with FourSquare to become the mayor of burger king to get a 10% discount on your next piece of crap for lunch, and watch your insurance company make a silent note.

Why is this bad? I eat healthy, and am healthier for it. Why should I have to subsidize the lard-asses who eat at BK every day?

Because that's how insurance works? If you have healthy and unhealthy people (let's assume for a moment they have a genetic disorder) who all have policies with the same insurance company, and all of the healthy people leave and start their own policy with another company where the premiums are lower (because the new company only insures "healthy" people). That makes the premiums skyrocket for the "unhealthy" people at the old insurance company because their money base just diminished but their costs did not diminish to the same proportion because "healthy" people cost less, and the poorest of the "unhealthy" people who stayed start to be able to not pay for it and drop out, which makes it even more difficult on the remaining "unhealthy" people (because now the money base is even smaller), so the whole original insurance company policies crumble.

So then you start to think "let people die in the streets" or "but what if we had a really big massive population that was all insured on the same plan with the same premiums - the 'unhealthy' people would be taken care of, and the healthy people would have a decent premium - still higher than a policy with all healthy people, but lower than a small population with 'unhealthy' people. And once you consider that pretty much everybody but the top 1% of any country will need some sort of healthcare when they get to be >55 regardless of previous 'healthy' or 'unhealthy' conditions, you start to see why nationalized healthcare is a good idea, that is, unless you're willing to let people die in the streets because they can't afford medical coverage.

And once you look into the issue in the US, you realize that the same people who are trying to push their religion on everybody else to save fetuses in the name of "pro-life" is willing to let 'unhealthy', unlucky, and elderly people die in the streets because they can't afford the powerful and awesome advances in technology that we have researched (with a great deal of public money) over the past 50+ years.

Anybody can get cancer at any time, and it might not be operable, curable, radiation-able, chemo-able, or survive-able. My girlfriend's 54 year old mom just got a prognosis of inoperable very probably terminal brain cancer, but it cost her over $30000 just to find out about it much less start a treatment! And if you think most people have $30000 dollars to burn to find out whats making them sick and who knows how much money to try to cure it then you're a fucking dumbass, because she's a property manager (manages houses/condos/apartments instead of buying/selling them), and she's having a tough time paying her medical expenses already.

Now, that's not to say that we should be subsidizing people who smoke, do drugs, eat McDonalds and Burger King all day everyday, or make any other number of stupid decisions, but genetic, incurable disorders/diseases need to not be allowed to be factors when deciding who gets insurance and who does not, but the already entrenched industry is simply going to find reasons to not insure people who just happen to have been born without the perfect genes.

Re:Shock Horror

[houghi]

I am confused. Must I read this in the voiceover of trainspotting or in the voice of Tyler Durden?

Anyway. Spot on.

Re:Shock Horror

[Anonymous Coward]

I ignore ALL ads--meaning I don't ever click on them--and the ones intended to be targeted ads are just plain creepy. If I accidentally click an ad it's because it popped up when I was clicking another page link. Normally, I've already noted and blocked the ad providers that page uses so I see no ads, or if the ad still shows the tracking scripts just fail to run. The fact is, these site owners are going to have to find another source of revenue than ads and user tracking. It's long overdue for a web advertising bubble burst, with that outcome being many advertising companies fail and never recover. Users like me don't want to see the ads, targeted or not targeted.

And Amazon? I only go to their site for the reviews these days... before I buy the product at a brick and mortar store not a dot com. I don't care what they have to recommend for me three years later after because of something I bought from them three years earlier--that's insulting to me. Because of that, the last time they sent me recommendations I promptly logged in to my account to fix that (disable them). Turns out something happened there that after logging in they lost all the purchase history so now I have an account with no purchase history at all which means I get no recommendations at all. Good because that one recommendation email alienated me from them, good riddance Amazon.

Know this: Advertising to me loses my business folks, meaning I regard ALL ads directed to me as spam.

Re:Shock Horror

[dargaud]

Here's an idea: a browser plugin to encrypt/decrypt messages on facebook. Only people to whom you have given the key can make sense of your messages... Of course, don't send out the keys via facebook...

Re:Shock Horror

[Anonymous Coward]

"Copy paper.."

Peepaw, is that you?

Re:Shock Horror

[rvw]

Indeed, although there is not much personal information on Slashdot. The problem is not that people have public lives, it is that Facebook greatly expands the scope of what is "public" while greatly diminishing the scope of what is "private." The information Facebook collects is much broader in scope than Slashdot, and extends beyond what people actively post on Facebook.

The Facebook website is one thing, the Like-buttons on thousands of websites, that's my biggest concern. Whenever you visit such a page, FB logs your visit because that button/script is loaded from their site. Whether you're logged into FB or not, they still log your visit and your IP-address. They obviously don't want you to know that they know which websites you visited and when. Maybe people on /. know about this, but 99% of the regular FB visitors probably don't.

Re:Shock Horror

[Tim C]

Check in with FourSquare to become the mayor of burger king to get a 10% discount on your next piece of crap for lunch, and watch your insurance company make a silent note.

a) The only insurance I have is on my house and my possessions, not my health
b) There is insufficient information on my Foursquare profile to connect me to my insurance-buying aspect

Write on your wall about your cool new Nike Football shoes, and watch targeted advertising appear to you for other football related products.

a) I block ads; so what?
b) Even if I didn't, I'd rather see relevant ads than the random crap I'd get otherwise.

Nothing is free. What I gain from using Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare is worth more to me than what I pay to use them. Please continue to feel smugly superior though.

Re:Shock Horror

[Gideon Wells]

I live in a small community. FaceBook, Twitter, all still more private than what is already considered public here. I hope my area is just an isolated case. If it isnt, then I'm tempted to say privacy has always been an de facto illusion. To borrow a phrase, it was privacy through obscurity, and easier done in urban areas.

Re:Shock Horror

[TheRaven64]

Are they? Recruiters seem to still find me, even though I'm not on any social networking sites (unless you count Slashdot). The most recent company to invite me for interview was... Facebook.

Re:Shock Horror

[TheRaven64]

You and I know that 'publicly' means 'on any server you don't control'. The masses think 'publicly' means 'on a site that doesn't have access control'. People don't realise that 'private' communications on FaceBook may not be seen by the world at large, but that are seen by anyone who pays FaceBook (including the CIA, which seems a bit silly because you'd have to be a total moron to use something like FaceBook if you're planning the sort of things that the CIA cares about).

Re:Shock Horror

[TheRaven64]

It would have to be. Dotsheep are hidden.

Re:Shock Horror

[TheRaven64]

Why is this bad? I'd rather see ads for things I like and might consider buying than scattershot ads for shit I'd never use.

I take it you missed the Slashdot story a couple of years ago about Amazon giving different prices based on the browser you use? Targeted advertising isn't where it ends. Companies like Google and Facebook often record enough information to tell how much you shop around before buying things, for example. It doesn't take much data mining to work out how much you'd be willing to pay for a specific product. Next time you visit an online store, you may find it's exactly that amount. Meanwhile, it costs 20% less to the next visitor...

Re:Shock Horror

[SteveFoerster]

The kind of advertisement that does affect me, if you can call it that, is word-of-mouth advertisement. Specifically, if you make a good product, and people give it consistently good reviews, I'm more likely to buy your product. If you make a s**tty product that falls apart in six months, I'm more likely to call up a manufacturer in China and go into business against you (which isn't very likely to happen at all, but is still a heck of a lot more likely than me buying your junk product).

I'm not sure a Chinese manufacturer is where I'd go if my goal were to produce a high quality product rather than an inexpensive one.

(Your post was interesting, BTW, that just sort of stuck out.)

Re:Shock Horror

[BrokenHalo]

It starts with the anonymous herd, and ends with the individual when they become interesting.

It does indeed, but there's no point in anybody getting indignant about it. Facebook's policies have been well known for some time, so nobody can claim ignorance. There is, of course, a very simple solution:

Don't give your personal information to Facebook.

Re:Shock Horror

[mcvos]

Write on your wall about your cool new Nike Football shoes, and watch targeted advertising appear to you for other football related products.

b) Even if I didn't, I'd rather see relevant ads than the random crap I'd get otherwise.

Both sides of this point have their merit. On the one hand, I case about my privacy, and don't want companies to profile everything I do. On the other hand, I'd rather see relevant ads than irrelevant ads. Should I sell my soul for comfort? Or stubbornly resist the flow and accept all the annoyances it brings? I'm not quite sure.

For the most part, they don't seem to be doing a terribly good job at showing me relevant ads, though. Except YouTube; ever since I googled for accountant services, YouTube keeps showing me ads for a few of them. And it's not stopping either; I don't even use Google for search anymore, and I still see those same ads.

Re:Shock Horror

[MrNthDegree]

Until you use pidgin or the like. Encryption of messages over facebook is convenient and has been for a long time, provided both sender/recipient use software with an appropriate plugin.

Re:Shock Horror

[Tsingi]

I'm anti-religion too. I don't care what you do on your own if it doesn't affect me, but religion scares me.

The prime example is all those Christians waiting for the rapture, hoping for it. These people actually want the world to end. Wars, environmental catastrophes, political upheavals, etc., are signs from "God" to these people. There are a lot of them, and they are allowed to vote, run for political office and make law.

It is NPC to criticize religion. How did that happen when it has the capability to profoundly effect us in such negative ways?

Re:Shock Horror

[Tsingi]

Whether you're logged into FB or not, they still log your visit and your IP-address.

Yup, on every page that has a like button. Which is why the NoScript/Firefox combo rules. You can see it, and disable it.

I tried Facebook out for a while, don't use it. I can't get my kids off it though, at least they know what they are dealing with.

Re:Shock Horror

[Tsingi]

Check in with FourSquare to become the mayor of burger king to get a 10% discount on your next piece of crap for lunch, and watch your insurance company make a silent note.

Why is this bad? I eat healthy, and am healthier for it. Why should I have to subsidize the lard-asses who eat at BK every day?

The way to deal with the public cost of fast food is to put a surtax on it and apply that money to the health care system. Like they do with cigarettes.
That way the fatties can lead their miserable lives and the rest of us don't have to pay for it. Much in the same way I don't have to pay for your devil-may-care attitude towards surveillance. I do my best to protect my information. Most of the sheep don't know or care. It's surprising that you do know and don't care, but that's your privilege.

As for Slashdot posts, I post them to give my opinion, if we didn't want anyone to read them, we wouldn't post them.

Re:Shock Horror

[rvw]

I do use it, though with caution. The problem is my smartphone. I use a different browser (Dolphin on Android) for Facebook only. That is my fix for the moment, until Chrome works on Android.

Re:Shock Horror

[Tsingi]

Yeah, mod him up. That IS interesting.

Re:Shock Horror

[PartyBoy!911]

For Firefox users this is simple to prevent.
Install Ghostery (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ghostery/) or ShareMeNot (http://sharemenot.cs.washington.edu/).
This blocks all the links to FB, google analytics, etc without all the hassle of RequestPolicy (http://www.requestpolicy.com/).
Also whitelist only the cookies you need with something like Cookie Whitelist (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/cookie-whitelist-with-buttons)

Facebook will destroy itself after a couple of years :-)

Re:Shock Horror

[geekmux]

Of course they'll tell you that. In fact, haven't you realised? You ARE their intellectual property. All you iSheep, Twits and FacePalmers. Go on, put your private life on teh intertubes for all to see. Check in with FourSquare to become the mayor of burger king to get a 10% discount on your next piece of crap for lunch, and watch your insurance company make a silent note. Write on your wall about your cool new Nike Football shoes, and watch targeted advertising appear to you for other football related products. The herd is a goldmine, ripe for the picking.

Yes, because only providing the "necessary" information such as name, SSN, birthdate, address, employer, annual salary, spouses information and SSN, your first car you ever owned, the name of your first grade teacher, your entire employment history, your entire medical history...the neverending plethora of VERY personal information you have to provide to various agencies throughout your adult life is MUCH much more secure because those agencies NEVER have security breaches, exposing millions of records at a time.

And one would have to be ignorant to believe that every bit of this isn't "online" somewhere.

Ripe for the picking you say? Uh, that would be every damn one of us, social media or not.

Re:Shock Horror

[Anonymous Coward]

Either you have a shitty spell checker, or you don't know enough about Facebook to not call it FaceBook.

Re:Shock Horror

[tehcyder]

Some years you don't buy any clothing or shoes? Reading slashdot makes me feel like a metrosexual fashion victim by comparison sometimes.

Re:Shock Horror

[Anonymous Coward]

You and I know that 'publicly' means 'on any server you don't control'.

So that would include email, and internet banking (because it's on a server you don't control).

Re:Shock Horror

[TheRaven64]

Yes, to both. My email is hosted on a server that I do control, but as soon as it is sent to someone else's server, it's effectively public. Internet banking data is shared with credit rating agencies, as noted in the T&Cs attacked to my bank account.

Re:Shock Horror

[Anonymous Coward]

note: FacePalmers

Re:Shock Horror

[dgatwood]

You can make high quality products with Chinese manufacturers, but you have to be very selective about which manufacturers you'll work with, and you have to pull random inspections to ensure that they are actually doing the QA testing they claim to be doing. Otherwise they'll send you half junk.

A lot of it also depends on the design work that went into it. If you've done the board layout and testing yourself, repeatedly ordering new test runs until you get a layout with perfect or near-perfect yield, you'll do a lot better than if you order a test run, have a 50% failure rate, and say, "It's okay. When people return it, we'll just send them a new one and toss the old one out."

The main reason to go with China is that it's just about the only place I've found where companies will even talk to you about small-run manufacturing. They've become experts at retooling a factory floor very rapidly for new products, which means that whether your production run is a thousand units or a million units, they can easily accommodate you. Most companies in the U.S., not so much. Thus, if you're a small business that's just starting out, unless you managed to secure the rather sizable funding to build your own manufacturing plant, outsourcing to China is usually the most feasible way to see your design actually turn into a physical product.

Re:Shock Horror

[dgatwood]

After finding a brand of shoes I like, I buy them in bulk. I'm just reaching the end of the stack of shoe boxes I bought four or five years ago. It's almost time to buy shoes again.

As for clothing, I have a closet full of short-sleeve shirts, and a closet full of long-sleeve shirts. Clothes last a long time if you wear them only once per month. Also, my parents often give me a shirt or two for Christmas, which further reduces the need to actually shop for clothes. And I buy white socks in bulk every few years so that they all match (which saves a lot of time while folding them).

So basically, the pattern is that I tend to buy a crapload of what I need when I realize that I need it, and then I don't buy any of that type of item again for months or years. I buy bar soap about once a year. I buy bottles of hand soap about once a year. I buy toothpaste about once a year. And so on. So it's probably not that I buy fewer total clothes than you, so much as that I buy more clothes less often.

Re:Shock Horror

[SteveFoerster]

Fair enough, and thanks for the informative response -- this isn't my area of expertise at all, but it's interesting.

Re:Shock Horror

[marcello_dl]

he, who? doesn't even list an email address. There is no problem with public forums, there is a problem in the mandatory real name policy.

Re:Shock Horror

[Hentes]

All you iSheep, Twits and FacePalmers. Go on, put your private life on teh intertubes for all to see.

Just nitpicking, but Twitter can be made private, in wich case only the ones you approve will see your tweets. Also, unlike other companies, Twitter tried to defend its users privacy even in court.

Re:Shock Horror

[rvw]

Thanks for the tip! I use Ghostery now and that seems to do the trick.

Re:Shock Horror

[KingBenny]

if the large trout won't work we'll just have to slap them a bit with european lawmakers who need votes then ... i think microsoft really admitted to that browser screen, i don't think zuckerberg has any more special powers than they do

Interesting

[iluvcapra]

So you, by definition, have knowledge of all of you personal information (otherwise it wouldn't be personal), they must think that they have a way of turning knowledge about your self that is available to you consciously, into information that isn't, for example by analyzing your web history, or use of language, or friends, in order to predict certain cultural preferences, or ad susceptibility. That's perfectly believable, and no, you probably aren't entitled to it. If you don't want them building models of you, don't submit your information.

Re:Interesting

[iluvcapra]

It might even be more fun than that. Maybe they know things about you that you never told them, like your gender or age. I would also tend to believe that if they're able to figure out this information about people they're probably entitled to keep the fact of their knowing secret.

Re:Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a witty and interesting reply to your comment, but I decided you weren't entitled to it.

Go fish.

Re:Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

They seem to have a back door agreement with Hotmail to get my and others' personal info*, so it's quite likely they have a bunch of other such deals and information that users never consented to them having.

*The only other option would be that literally everyone that ever mailed me at my Hotmail account consented to have their email account searched by Facebook, while the people who emailed me at my gmail account did not.

Re:Interesting

[Fluffeh]

If they are adding that as information about "you" to the folks they sell your information to, you should be entitled to get it under a request of "what information about me do you have" - not a "what information have I given to you about me, minus all the other stuff you worked out on your own...".

However, I can also see that giving all that information may well end up opening an interesting kettle of fish. What if one of their derived bits of information about you were that you were a white supremacist? What if they worked out that you were interested in cross dressing? What if you wanted to keep both of these facts very very secret - I mean a white supremacist cross dresser?

Re:Interesting

[muon-catalyzed]

Maybe they know much more via syndication with other networks.

Re:Interesting

[Baloroth]

After reading (well, skimming anyways) TFA, I really feel I should point out Facebook didn't say in TFA that the personal information was a trade secret, only that it would be an exception if it was. Possibly, they omitted information under the other exception, which is if it is exceptionally difficult to provide the information, and only gave both exceptions for maximum ass-coverage (and tinfoil-hat coverage too, apparently).

It wouldn't surprise me at all if they had more information than you gave them (such as from web tracking) which they don't give out, but TFA mentions data that he knew should have been there that wasn't. This leads me to suspect that this falls under the latter exception, for some reason. There really isn't enough information to know whether Facebook actually considers your data a trade secret (they don't even mention what the data was that Facebook omitted.)

Re:Interesting

[Phrogman]

Well there was J Edgar Hoover, wasn't he into cross dressing? And he was definitely very right wing...

Re:Interesting

[somersault]

I think it must go further than that. A coworker today was wondering why Facebook recommended as a friend a person that we recognise the name of from within our company, but in an overseas branch. They have no Facebook friends in common. He's never sent or received mail from her on a personal account (he's obviously signed up to Facebook on one of those accounts), never given Facebook any clue as to his work email or even the place he works. I was thinking there must be a simple explanation, but maybe there are more devious things afoot, like scanning Hotmail contacts when the friend finder is used, and linking together two people from someone else's Hotmail account?

Re:Interesting

[garcia]

Genderizing datasets isn't a difficult thing to do. Just ask anyone using DataFlux.

Re:Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

Just throw them off their guard, I say. Post a long and insightful (original words preferable) messages praising Fox news one day and MSNBC few hours later. Mix and match, lather, rinse and repeat. By end of a quarter, be seen to them as a love child of Murdoch and Assange. That will teach them.

Re:Interesting

[deniable]

Maybe they've both listed the same company as a workplace. Unlikely, but possible.

Re:Interesting

[PopeRatzo]

. A coworker today was wondering why Facebook recommended as a friend a person that we recognise the name of from within our company, but in an overseas branch.

I've got a better one: A colleague who has a facebook account but has never posted anything, not a photo, not even information in the profile got a recommendation from Facebook to add as a friend someone who is in her cancer survivor's group. The absolutely only bit of information about her that she's been able to find on Facebook is a photograph from a different friend's profile in which she appears but is not named in the photo's info. As I said, she has never posted anything about herself and the person who was recommended to her is not the facebook friend of a facebook friend.

Wrap your head around that one. Now maybe there's some bit of data she forgot about or some connection she has been unable to learn, but she's really a detail-oriented person and has just not been able to determine how this connection was made.

Either way, it's creepy as hell and she deleted her account, although she has no misconceptions that anything collected about her has been deleted. I guess you would say she "closed" her account because it does not appear that Facebook ever willingly relents a scrap of info.

My suggestion? Back out slowly, don't try to delete your account. Change your name, get facial reconstruction and move far away.

I never really liked it much, but I just won't touch that shit any more. I hate to sound like an eccentric old crank but I've been writing letters a lot more lately. I don't even let my eyes linger on the Facebook icon on any webpages I read.

Re:Interesting

[deniable]

Yeah, OK, I'll read the entire post next time. (Didn't list place of work or employer.)

Re:Interesting

[betterunixthanunix]

If you don't want them building models of you, don't submit your information.

How many people are willing to stand up to their friends and say, "No, I am not on Facebook, please send me an email if you want to invite me to an event?" How many people are knowledgeable enough to take the time to set up ABP and NoScript, or to configure the equivalent in their browser of choice? The problem with not participating in Facebook is that it is spread out all over the web, large numbers of people use it as their primary means of communicating, and many people simply assume that everyone in their social circle is on Facebook.

Really, Facebook is entitled to its trade secrets: the algorithms that it uses to compile their profile of you (which is definitely not what most people think of as their "Facebook profile"). Why should the results of those algorithms be considered trade secrets, and why should the people whose lives were analyzed not be entitled to know what the results of the analysis are?

Re:Interesting

[crutchy]

personal information isn't just what you personally divulge. if someone mentions your name in a facebook/twitter/slashdot post (even if someone else sharing the same name), you may be automatically associated with that person (and you may have no idea you were even mentioned anywhere), so even the facephobes may be profiled without their knowing. you don't even need a facebook account. web crawling is all just associative data. though i bet google has bigger treasure troves of this data than facebook.

Re:Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

People like to imagine facebook as another google. Some crazy machine conciousness that is beyond our human understanding. Facebook is actually kind of retarded. It's only after you give it something to work with that the stalker algorithms get to work.

Remember, facebook not only mines your contact book but everything you ever say and who you said it to. If it isn't a contact list being linked somewhere, it is the people you are talking to.

I have a dozen or so facebook accounts, and none of of them have ever tried to connect to each other or anything like the stories I hear from other people. And they don't mention usernames or email addresses. Facebook has no voodoo. It's basically fucking clueless if you don't feed it data.

Re:Interesting

[creigs]

Every web page that has a FB 'like" button or other FB gizmo is automatically recording that you visited that page in FB's data bank. That could solve some of the mysteries of why FB recommends certain friends who haven't even filled out their FB profiles -- you both probably visited the same unusual web pages, and have a few other things in common like location (FB could get it from your IP address if not from your profile). FB can do this whether or not you have a FB account and have agreed to FB's privacy policy. Considering the FB javascript code is embedded into other web pages, I'm not sure that they cannot see the data you enter into all the forms as well. What a goldmine of information that would be!!! You could clean out your FB cookies after every web site you visit, so you look like a new person to keep FB from correlating all the pages you visit and form data you fill out (assuming they don't correlate by your IP address alone). Better, you can get a plug-in that blocks anything from FB from loading into other web site's pages until you give it permission (e.g. Request Policy for FF) Or you can just accept that FB knows just about everything you do on the web, since just about every significant web site promotes itself by having an associated FB page they want you to "like". (As a webmaster, I've decided to take the lead from some German web sites, and disable the FB "like" button in my website until a person clicks on a button to enable it. And it's permanently disabled on any page where the user can enter personal information.)

Re:Interesting

[bipbop]

Facebook knows who all my friends are, and I don't even have an account. I suppose I count as a "facephobe", though I'd like to think of it more as possessing uncommon sense.

Re:Interesting

[Wordplay]

The simplest "people you may know" method is to mine people's contacts when they voluntarily upload them (email, phone, IM, etc.) in a "find my friends" flow. Most of the "holy crap it's my decade-ago ex-girlfriend" style shocks I get are because they still have me in an address book somewhere and they shared it.

Re:Interesting

[jpapon]

Perhaps they didn't make their employer public information, but did enter it at some point.

Re:Interesting

[dgatwood]

colleague who has a facebook account but has never posted anything, not a photo, not even information in the profile got a recommendation from Facebook to add as a friend someone who is in her cancer survivor's group. The absolutely only bit of information about her that she's been able to find on Facebook is a photograph from a different friend's profile in which she appears but is not named in the photo's info. As I said, she has never posted anything about herself and the person who was recommended to her is not the facebook friend of a facebook friend.

Nah. It's a lot dumber than that. Your colleague probably has several friends who have several friends, and if you walk through a few degrees of separation, there are probably at least two paths that connect her to the suggested person.

I mostly see people I've never met as a result of those algorithms, but every once in a while, it lists somebody who I know peripherally.

Re:Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

Never heard of reverse engineering, have you.

Re:Interesting

[crutchy]

nothing wrong with being a facephobe. i have a facebook account, but its pretty much so my wife can tag me in her photos. i hate social networking, but i also hate socialising. slashdot is about as social as i prefer

Re:Interesting

[houghi]

I had an account for some weeks. I did NOT comply to their demand of using my own name. I try to keep my real life name off the Internet almost from the beginning.

The reason was privacy. Do I have something to hide? You bet I do. It is called my personal life and it is MINE.

And if Facebook does not want to give out the personal information they have as required by law, well then delete that data and don't accept anybody from Europe.

The biggest hint something was seriously wrong with it was the fact that you needed to give your real name. A few years ago we did some silly test. We saw some persons name and we made a bet who had this strangers on the phone first with only information from the Internet. This was before Facebook or even Google. It was so much easier then we thought, it wasn't even a challenge. One girl we saw contacted one of us with YahooPager to chat and it took us 10 minutes when the following words were typed: Your phone will ring now!

And this was just some goofy guys fooling around. We had no system. We had no knowledge and we had no own database with links between people. We just knew how to use the search engines of that time.

Re:Interesting

[MadKeithV]

It might even be more fun than that. Maybe they know things about you that you never told them, like your gender or age. I would also tend to believe that if they're able to figure out this information about people they're probably entitled to keep the fact of their knowing secret.

Disclaimer, I am not a lawyer, but insofar as I understand the law this cannot apply in Europe - in Europe they are required by law to give you access to all personal data stored about you so that you can correct or remove it. See the Personal Data Law, specifically the data subject's "right of access" to personal data.

Re:Interesting

[HopefulIntern]

Depends on the jurisdiction I would think, but in the UK the Freedom of Information Act gives any person the right to demand to see any and all information held by a company about them (for a nominal fee to cover admin costs). This, AFAIK, is not limited to information you have directly given them,

Re:Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

"slashdot is about as social as i prefer"

Amen, brother.

Re:Interesting

[jaminJay]

If you don't want them building models of you, don't use the internet. Do you seriously believe that not choosing to have an account protects you at all? Do you not see all the Facebook hooks everywhere? And no, blocking their domain is not a reasonable solution for the masses, and still won't prevent your details from entering their database.

Re:Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

Experienced this same thing. An employee in a sister company (which is under a totally different company name, separate email addresses, etc) we have in eastern Europe was suggested to me as a friend - my account was a work account and didn't include my real name, didn't include the company name anywhere and had 0 friends with which to create these links. Not sure I even want to know how they did this.

Re:Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

That's perfectly believable, and no, you probably aren't entitled to it.

Perhaps not in the US, but the EU doesn't limit personal information to what was consciously submitted. Personal information is information about a person.

On a moral level it's ridiculous that a company that declared privacy to be dead (or something similar) wants to have its own privacy in the form of trade secrets. If you think it's all right to know as much as you can about as many people as you can, then don't object to anything anyone else wants to know about you, just tell them what they want to know.

If you don't want them building models of you, don't submit your information.

They build their models using information that people aren't aware they are submitting and information other people consciously or unconsciously submit. It's not as simple as you appear to think, and that is one of the reasons that Facebook goes too far.

Re:Interesting

[Larryish]

I don't even let my eyes linger on the Facebook icon on any webpages I read.

And you know Facebook will see you looking at their icon, and be all like "OMG PopeRatzo looked at the icon, draw some boobs on it so he'll click!"

Re:Interesting

[MancunianMaskMan]

simple. your colleague user her email address to sign up, which the other cancer survivor hat previously entered into facebook search to figure whether she is on facebook. facebook remembered the search even though it didn't return any matches at the time, but made good use of it by suggesting a probable friend candidate.
creepy: yes
creepy by facebook creepiness standards(R): no

Re:Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

The U.S. has something like this, but it only applies to governmental organizations. Private enterprise just claims everything is a trade secret.

Re:Interesting

[Maritz]

I believe you're thinking of the Data Protection Act of 1998 - the act you're thinking about is quite different; it's more about the activities of public bodies as I recall. DPA has provisions for a 'data subject access request' which companies can charge up to £10 for.

Please let the EU do this

[Anonymous Coward]

They'll get into a pissing contest and the EU will shut them down after fining them a massive amount of money. It'll only work for EU residents mind you. UK residents can use the data protection act to demand all data about them to be handed over for a nominal fee.

Re:Please let the EU do this

[BlueScreenO'Life]

That is true for companies with which you have a contract that involves sending them personal information.

Whether Facebook and others like Google, Microsoft, etc. are bound by the DPD remains to be seen. They are not from a EU country and they did not sign a contract with you - I don't think there's an official client-provider relation between their users (especially their EU users) and them. Some court might try to force them to hand over the data on account of national laws but that's open to interpretation. It would be interesting to see how that would work out though.

Re:Please let the EU do this

[xaxa]

That is true for companies with which you have a contract that involves sending them personal information.

No, it's true for all companies that hold personal information. See the ICO for more details (for the UK).

They are not from a EU country

http://www.facebook.com/terms.php

The website under www.facebook.com and the services on these pages are being offered to you by:

  Facebook Ireland Limited
  Hanover Reach, 5-7 Hanover Quay, Dublin 2 Ireland

Remember...

[LqdSlpStrm]

If it is free, you are not the client. You are the product, and you are being sold.

Re:Remember...

[artor3]

Please stop this stupid meme. You are the customer. You buy a service and pay with information and by looking at ads. They sell this information and ad space to third parties for money. Those third parties are also customers. The product is the service, since that is what they are producing.

Re:Remember...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep. You are also paying by making their service more valuable to other users via the network effect.

Re:Remember...

[betterunixthanunix]

Thus explaining why they track people on other websites.

Re:Remember...

[subreality]

I'll drop the meme when they stop treating me like a product.

Re:Remember...

[savuporo]

I think you are severely deluding yourself if you seriously think that all the "harm" that ever comes from fb obsessively tracking you, is targeted ads.

Re:Remember...

[cyberstealth1024]

+1 Insightful (sorry, I don't have "real" mod points)

Re:Remember...

[TheVelvetFlamebait]

Not really. Just like with a client, they have to keep you satisfied, otherwise you'll stop dealing with them, and they'll get no money.

Re:Remember...

[Anonymous Coward]

That's like saying that a cows are customers of dairy farmers because they buy the food and a place to live and pay with their milk.

Re:Remember...

[fermion]

Certainly in the US not all personal data is legally available to the consumer. The data collected by credit agencies must be disclosed, but in my experience the score the consumer gets is not the same as the score the retailer gets. The retailer is the customer, while the consumer is simply a drain on profits.

Millions of people are willing to give retailers personal data in exchange for a discount off inflated prices. The customer in retailer is quickly becoming the firms that buy data. I wonder how much a place like krogers makes of sales of good and how much they make off sales of data. I dare say the later may be the greater.

The piper must be paid, and if the consumer is not paying it, then someone must be paying to derive some advantage from the consumer. Google does not give apps away for the simple sake of "do no evil". Facebook has to make money somehow, and the proprietary data analysis is going to be it or there will be no facebook because the kids aren't going to pay $5 a month for a digital wall. That is why AOL is no longer the biggest ISP. The value of online services to consumers are essentially zero. So when I see something like this I see it as an attack to kill facebook, which is not bad, I don't use and see little value in it, but it seems kind of a childish thing to do. Facebook is likely doing no more harm than TV or video games.

Re:Remember...

[cjc25]

While they do need to keep you satisfied, it's only because you're a new type of product that isn't mined or manufactured, but attracted with useful or at least enjoyable timesinks. You're still the product, even if their method of obtaining the product doesn't have analog in the physical world.

Re:Remember...

[Waccoon]

I know. I feel that way every time I try a Linux distro.

Re:Remember...

[Cant use a slash wtf]

That sounds like a horribly mindless repetition of a very situational quote. If you put any thought into that post, you might just realise that things can be free without being malicious.

Re:Remember...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's more like a supplier - they have to not piss you off or you'll stop supplying them with all this valuable information

Re:Remember...

[91degrees]

It's one way of looking at it, and from a certain point of view, totally valid.

From another point of view, it's a load of rubbish. They still need to attract customers. They need to provide a service that will benefit you. Income is directly related to the number of customers they have.

Re:Remember...

[dzfoo]

No, the product is the data--your data. The service is an expense, the cost of doing business, the means to acquire and aggregate that data to be sold.

Facebook, Twitter, Google and the like have already gone far from trying to offer a good service which is subsidized by advertising. The advertising and data brokering is now their business model and their main focus, and the service is collateral that is maximized to fulfill that model.

In a very real sense, users of the service are the product.

          -dZ.

Re:Remember...

[tangent]

No, you most certainly are the product.

It's more like how a cattle rancher has to be careful not to let too many of his cows run off, or get kilt by rattlers.

The rancher's expressions of concern are by way of protecting his product, rather than protection of a client relationship.

Re:Remember...

[TheVelvetFlamebait]

Yeah, but if you start stripping away these things, it starts to lose the essence of being a "product". If you remove the requirement to be owned or controlled by the people trying to sell a product, in what sense is it a product? More relevantly, in what sense are you not a client? And besides, if products do not have this requirement, then does the word "product" deserve the negative stigma it receives?

Re:Remember...

[roundscimitar]

I created a free site, truefriender but the free users are subsidized by the paying users, the 5 gig account is free. And unlike facebook, since there is a direct path to income, advertisements are not needed, and neither is personal information, so we encrypt everything. We are trying to make a secure private social network. Please don't mod this down cause I'm just trying to get the word out to people who might be interested in this service.

Re:Remember...

[TheVelvetFlamebait]

But, in your analogy, the cattle are free to leave at any time! I have never heard of ranching like this! I have heard of serving customers in this way though.

Re:Remember...

[Anonymous Coward]

You can break any analogy by stretching it too far.

Cattle have to be kept in with fences. People require subtler means to keep them in the corral.

That difference doesn't change the fact that Facebook has an incentive to keep their product happy enough not to go wandering off.

Re:Remember...

[TheVelvetFlamebait]

You can break any analogy by stretching it too far.

That's a pretty lousy excuse for a broken analogy. I'm not pushing it to the fringes. The correspondence (or more specifically, the lack thereof) between how the ranches treat their cattle and how the social networks treat their customers is the one and only important feature of your analogy. Without that, your analogy has nothing.

Cattle have to be kept in with fences. People require subtler means to keep them in the corral.

That difference doesn't change the fact that Facebook has an incentive to keep their product happy enough not to go wandering off.

That's true. On the other hand, the positive incentive and freedom to leave is a lot more in line with, for example, a hotel or a cafe with regular customers, or really anything else where people are repeatedly served and have the option to stop any time. This requires a lot less stretching than comparing with a ranch.

This actually makes some sense.

[LordArgon]

Whether good or bad, the type and structure of the data stored can definitely hint at the proprietary stuff they're doing with it.

Correct

[Dunbal]

Facebook: Your Personal Data is a Trade Secret

I agree 100%, which is why I refuse to give my personal data to Facebook (or anyone else).

Re:Correct

[PessimysticRaven]

Facebook: Your Personal Data is a Trade Secret

I agree 100%, which is why I refuse to give my personal data to Facebook (or anyone else).

Not to be trollish, but:

Do you use a bank? Checks? Credit Card? Discount Card? Have a job? Have an SSN? (if U.S.) Have a visa? Have a house? Have a line of credit? Use Google? Use Hotmail? Use Windows? Mac? Linux? Breathe?

Surprise. It's out there.

Re:Correct

[Dunbal]

Bank? Yes. Checks? Haven't written one for the past 4 years. Credit card? Yes I have 3. Discount card? No. Job? Self employed. SSN? Nope, not in the US. Visa? Nope, I'm Canadian so I don't need one for the US. House? I own corporations that own houses. The corporations were originally created with third parties as shareholders and I ended up buying all the shares privately. My annual general meetings are very short. Line of credit? Nope, don't need it. Google? Yeah I use the search engine. Hotmail? For non important stuff like website memberships. I have a couple domains and my "real" emails are there. Others I make and delete on demand. I use Windows and Linux. I use pseudonyms and never give the OS my real name.

How much is out there, really?

Re:Correct

[PessimysticRaven]

Well, to be a semantic ass, you ARE making the decision to not give your private data out to anyone else... But that doesn't mean that your bank or card issuer, etc. hasn't passed it themselves part of an advertising agreement with FB. (not saying there IS, but would it shock anyone?)

Problem is, I'm certain we all know it, but simply can't do much about it, legally.

Just saying.

Re:Correct

[Baloroth]

Much much more than you would suspect. Any friends who use Facebook? Are there records of the corporations you bought and own (sweet gig there, BTW)? And of course, all your credit info from the cards is available (online from credit report sites). Also, I imagine you have a drivers license (not sure how info from that woks in Canada, though)

Now, this info isn't necessarily available entirely or easily to most people. But to major companies? Hell yeah. Even the houses could be traced back to you pretty easily. Unless you are deliberately staying off the radar using shell companies and the like, which is a lot of work and rarely worth it unless you are either insanely rich, insanely paranoid, or insanely criminal (bonus points for all three), companies will almost certainly have quite a lot on you.

Re:Correct

[Anonymous Coward]

House? I own corporations that own houses. The corporations were originally created with third parties as shareholders and I ended up buying all the shares privately.

Land ownership records are public, as are corporate ownership & corporate officer records (in Canada and many other countries).

Re:Correct

[Dunbal]

Yup. Find the country.

Re:Correct

[Dunbal]

Funny I keep googling myself and nothing ever turns up. Except an address I lived at in Texas for 5 months about 6 years ago. I guess it was either the power or cable company that "turned me in".

Re:Correct

[savuporo]

Hi, im Google spider. I just made a note of the fact that you keep googling yourself. Thanks.

Re:Correct

[Anonymous Coward]

Canadian?

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Feckle syrup, Feckle syrup, Feckle syrup, Feckle syrup, Feckle syrup, Feckle syrup, Feckle syrup, Feckle syrup, Feckle syrup, Feckle syrup, Feckle syrup, Feckle syrup, Feckle syrup, Feckle syrup, Feckle syrup, Feckle syrup, Feckle syrup, Feckle syrup, Feckle syrup, Feckle syrup, Feckle syrup, Feckle syrup, Feckle syrup, Feckle syrup, Feckle syrup, Feckle syrup, Feckle syrup, Feckle syrup, .....

Re:Correct

[maxwell demon]

You just gave quite a bit information about yourself. You are a self-employed Canadian, invested in Housing corporations, have three credit cards, use Windows and Linux, hold several domains, and in another post you told that you lived in Texas for 5 months 6 years ago, and that address turns up in Google. Also, you regularly Google yourself.

Clicking on your Slashdot profile and reading some of your other posts quickly reveals that you had a condo on the beach in Boca Raton since the 1970's, live in the third world, are married and are a doctor. (Unless in some of your posts you were lying, of course)

I wonder if that information would be sufficient to uniquely identify you. Especially since someone really determined on that would do more than just scan through your posts of the past few days. Possibly you use the same nickname on other services (a quick Google search should reveal whether the nick is used otherwise, and reading a few posts would then give a pretty good guess if it's you from the writing style), and in that case more information about you might be gathered from those places.

Frank Zappa had incredible foresight

[stevegee58]

He was originally talking about television but it applies to Facebook as well:

...Your mind is totally controlled
It has been stuffed into my mold
And you will do as you are told
Until the rights to you are sold...

Res ipsa loquitur

[Killer Instinct]

Res ipsa loquitur "... the elements of duty of care and breach can be sometimes inferred from the very nature of an accident or other outcome, even without direct evidence of how any defendant behaved..." i.e you made an account, gave them all your info, added friends who gave them even more info about you...so by "accident" you breached and transfered any info about you to them, without neccesarily knowing you were signing away your right to privacy with your life,so even though they dont have the direct evidence you intended this to happen, it is their data none the less.

Fact-free learning

[gonz]

Minor rearrangements of existing facts can be considered to be innovative new facts.

Consider this cool paper from Aragones et al:

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=643545

Quantity

[WPIDalamar]

It could be that the quantity of data they collect is far more than anyone suspects and that's the trade secret.

Hahahahahaa. capitalism in ultimate form.

[unity100]

Now, your private information is THEIR property. The ownership of YOUR own private information, is lost.

Re:Hahahahahaa. capitalism in ultimate form.

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah well, in socialism, you don't have property either, the stat...err the people, excuse me, own everything.

Re:Hahahahahaa. capitalism in ultimate form.

[Anonymous Coward]

But don't go sharing music now, that's still clearly *their* property.

So let's see how the rules work.....

What's mine is theirs, and what's theirs is theirs.

That wasn't too hard now was it?

communist solution

[Anonymous Coward]

NATIONALIZE THE INTERNET. its a commons. free government paid for social networking, privacy protection written into the constitution, national constitutions amended to include the right to access to the internet. think about it. we dont have private roads, and most of the privatization recently has really sucked. start reversing privatization. people act like facebook is a free government service, so lets turn it into one.

Re:communist solution

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah sure, let's hand it over to the Yanks. That wouldn't cause any problems for the rest of the world....

Re:communist solution

[spazzmo]

As far as the Yanks are concerned, they already think they own the whole world and everyone in it.

Re:communist solution

[qw(name)]

Yeah sure, let's hand it over to the Yanks.

What does baseball have to do with the discussion?

Trade Secrets are easily broken

[Anonymous Coward]

Are they not? IIRC, the one claiming it's a trade secret must work to keep it secret, and if it's data that *I* know, since I am not bound by an yagreement to FB to keep it secret, doesn't that mean they have lost the secrecy needed to make it a Trade "Secret"?

Facebook vs. Scientology

[Anonymous Coward]

I am curious to see what would happen if somebody posted a Scientology text on Facebook. I doubt Scientologists would accept the text being 'deactivated' but kept in Facebook's servers.

Re:Facebook vs. Scientology

[GameboyRMH]

There are a few on Wikileaks and Cryptome if anyone wants to try :D

Laws to be written

[Anonymous Coward]

Facebook has a legitimate interest in keeping their trade secrets secret. Unfortunately for them, the interest of the public of knowing what information they are keeping and potentially selling about each of us completely trumps their trade secret interests in any sane world.

Are we on the way...

[noelhenson]

to Asimov's psychohistory?

OK, everybody place a legal notice in the paper

[Anonymous Coward]

Two can play at this game. Everybody place a legal notice in the paper that does essentially the same thing, except that you are simply claiming your own personal data. State that your data may not be used without a contract and payment subject to negotiation, and that you regard unsigned agreements as invalid. It may or may not stand up in court, but it'll be a helluva good show.

Re:OK, everybody place a legal notice in the paper

[ad454]

Two can play at this game. Everybody place a legal notice in the paper that does essentially the same thing, except that you are simply claiming your own personal data. State that your data may not be used without a contract and payment subject to negotiation, and that you regard unsigned agreements as invalid. It may or may not stand up in court, but it'll be a helluva good show.

That won't work for adults since they can claim that as the owner of your personal data, you automatically give them a licence to use your data when you agreed to use their services. It might work for minors, since in many countries, minors are not allowed to sign contracts or give up rights, without parents' permission.

For adults, one can formally sign the complete rights to their personal information to a trusted individual (like a parent) or organization, before joining any social network service. Then have the trusted entity sue the social network service when they use your personal data without permission.

Of course if that trusted entity decides to "DO EVIL", then you will be total screwed.

Re:OK, everybody place a legal notice in the paper

[Anonymous Coward]

Can you form a cheap LLC someplace and sign it over to that?

Re:OK, everybody place a legal notice in the paper

[pakar]

Well, lets just put:
By having opened this letter you agree that all previous agreements are null and void until a new contract, signed by both parties, has been established between us.

All personal data relating to me on your system shall be deleted within 1 week of reception of this letter if no new agreement has been established. Failure to comply will result in a 500â/day rent-fee for all my personal information.

Re:OK, everybody place a legal notice in the paper

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh.. just realized something... Since the rules says all data related to me i have the right to get a copy on all images i may be in... That would include all images from everyone... Maybe using the face-recognition system they have.. :D

Think i'm gonna ask a friend to put a trojan-horse in his account and see how well they follow the rules :D

Money!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm gonna send facebook an invoice for knowing my personal data! It's obviously worth money.

Whats a life worth anyway.. What about a geeks life?

Like I have said before

[Anonymous Coward]

Facebook for youngsters in college, in high school, middle school, etc. These groups do not know what the hell they are doing. There should be awareness made these educational levels to tell this bunch of kids to learn to protect themselves, friends, family members from one common enemy -- FACEBOOK.

Re:Like I have said before

[moozey]

You'd be surprised how many 30+ year old's use it. If anything, they'll be the more ignorant internet users.

Facebook is a business

[msobkow]

Unlike some governments, businesses are not subject to "Freedom of Information" queries.

Nor do you have any "rights" other than those set out in the terms of service, other than the right to refuse those terms and go elsewhere.

Surely these Austrians aren't naive enough to think they're going to shove their laws down an international organization's throat? If they object that strongly, try to have Facebook blocked and banned from Austria. That is and should be their only legal recourse -- you cannot have international organizations subject to the whims of every nation in the world that the internet reaches.

Granted, some organizations may capitulate to pressure from some governments rather than lose that audience/revenue stream, but that's their choice, and they can just as easily pull their operations as Google did with China.

Re:Facebook is a business

[Anonymous Coward]

Surely these Austrians aren't naive enough to think they're going to shove their laws down an international organization's throat? If they object that strongly, try to have Facebook blocked and banned from Austria. That is and should be their only legal recourse -- you cannot have international organizations subject to the whims of every nation in the world that the internet reaches.

Yes and no. What you are saying sounds dangerously close to claiming Facebook is completely above the law (of every country) and can do whatever the fuck it likes just because it is multinational. Unless we establish a planet wide government (which is a bad idea anyway), I don't think corporate immunity to prosecution in all jurisdictions is a good idea.

BTW, companies are usually subject to the laws of countries that it chooses to do business in. IANAL, but Facebook could have just made "Country" a mandatory field when signing up and rejecting anyone who selects "Austria". Sure, you can get around that easily but it shows intent to not operate in that jurisdiction.

Nor do you have any "rights" other than those set out in the terms of service, other than the right to refuse those terms and go elsewhere.

Also, corporations are legal constructs, they exist because the government says they do and accepts paperwork applying to create one. This means that you can, and in many countries [other than the US perhaps], do have rights (typically called "consumer protection"), there are also privacy laws which may give you the right to demand a company delete everything they know about you and require explicit permission to sell to 3rd parties, etc. Most interactions with companies outside of a one-shot purchase will also use contract law which also includes protections against 'unfairness' and such. [Try including "you accept to allow us to enslave you first born and have them become our property" in a Terms of Service, no government outside of a hell-hole with accept the legitimacy of that and will either reject or penalise the company for including it]

Re:Facebook is a business

[Animats]

Unlike some governments, businesses are not subject to "Freedom of Information" queries.

In the European Union, businesses are.

THE DATA SUBJECT'S RIGHT OF ACCESS TO DATA

Member States shall guarantee every data subject the right to obtain from the controller:
(a) without constraint at reasonable intervals and without excessive delay or expense:
- confirmation as to whether or not data relating to him are being processed and information at least as to the purposes of the processing, the categories of data concerned, and the recipients or categories of recipients to whom the data are disclosed,
- communication to him in an intelligible form of the data undergoing processing and of any available information as to their source,
- knowledge of the logic involved in any automatic processing of data concerning him at least in the case of the automated decisions referred to in Article 15 (1);
(b) as appropriate the rectification, erasure or blocking of data the processing of which does not comply with the provisions of this Directive, in particular because of the incomplete or inaccurate nature of the data;
(c) notification to third parties to whom the data have been disclosed of any rectification, erasure or blocking carried out in compliance with (b), unless this proves impossible or involves a disproportionate effort.

Re:Facebook is a business

[HopefulIntern]

Correct, both EU law and UK law give you this right.

Re:Facebook is a business

[Martin S.]

Facebook is incorporated in the Republic of Ireland which is a signature party to the EU data protection directive. Facebook have no choice, subject data access is EU law.

Re:Facebook is a business

[Anonymous Coward]

facebook can really brace themselves now and prepare to be banned from the EU if they dont change their attitude

Re:Facebook is a business

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, another US company using Eire as a tax haven!

Just like Microsoft, Adobe and the rest.

No wonder the Republic is broke. Thinks of all that Business tax revenue that they could have collected...

{No, I'm not on FB, Twatter etc. I value my privacy.}

Re:Facebook is a business

[Anonymous Coward]

Unlike some governments, businesses are not subject to "Freedom of Information" queries.

Nor do you have any "rights" other than those set out in the terms of service, other than the right to refuse those terms and go elsewhere.

Then we need to take a page from Europe's playback and fix this obvious oversight.

Also, you make the common mistake of assuming that a free market is a free market. How many people are on Facebook because their friends all are? How many people use alternatives? Sure, you might argue that Google+ is a possible contender, but Facebook still has the lion's share of users.

Re:Facebook is a business

[msobkow]

EU law, yes -- it's a big enough market to be followed. But the article does not mention anything about Facebook violating EU regulations. It only mentions that it's Austrians raising the issues.

But no company follows the regulations of every nation where the internet reaches. Suppressionist regimes like Iran have such insane laws that it's IMPOSSIBLE to follow them all.

Re:Facebook is a business

[Animats]

But the article does not mention anything about Facebook violating EU regulations. It only mentions that it's Austrians raising the issues.

Austria is a member of the European Union. (I shouldn't have to post this.)

Re:Facebook is a business

[Anonymous Coward]

You must be American. This isn't Austria vs Facebook, they're called Europeans vs Facebook for a reason. Facebook isn't going to walk away from half the western world's customers (but good riddance if they would). And the European Union has and will shove it's laws down international organizations throats and they WILL comply, as Microsoft among others has found out.

Privacy is high on Europe's citizens, politicians and media radar and Facebook is highly suspect already. They might very well comply just to avoid more bad press.

Re:Facebook is a business

[Anonymous Coward]

Naturally Facebook - and their employees - will have to answer to european data protection laws. This is pretty simple stuff.

It is not the wild west all over the planet.

If you still are a facebook member

[Stan92057]

If you still are a face book member you have zero to complain about. If your not a member why do you care? Your not going to change anything, your not a member you don't have a voice. Whats not so funny to me is that they are allowed to continually,repeatedly break privacy laws all over the world and no ones been arrested yet. Why is that?

Actually,

[BlueScreenO'Life]

After reading TFA and the fine website of Europe vs Facebook it turns out they are honoring the European (Irish) law and sending CDs with personal info to whoever requests them; the kind of data they're refusing to hand over is:

"Data like the biometrical information or ”likes” are seen at trade secret, intellectual property or are simply too complicated to send to users according to Facebook."

It raises the question whether it's reasonable to request from them information such as your "likes". It sounds to me like asking a company to hand you over a log with your phone calls and email exchanges; I don't think they have that obligation.

Re:Actually,

[Zironic]

If they store it, and it counts as personal information, they're required to hand it over. The European data laws have no exception for "too complicated'.

Re:Actually,

[Spad]

However they do have exceptions for data that is commercially sensitive, though it's a very narrow definition and not something you can easily use as a blanket "get out" clause. If in doubt, file a complaint with your Information Commissioner's office (or local equivalent) as they will quite quickly be able to rule on whether or not Facebook or justifiably invoking the Trade Secret option.

Re:Actually,

[AliasMarlowe]

It raises the question whether it's reasonable to request from them information such as your "likes". It sounds to me like asking a company to hand you over a log with your phone calls and email exchanges; I don't think they have that obligation.

If the company has kept a record of such events and linked them explicitly to your name, then it should count as personal data.

Re:Actually,

[Anonymous Coward]

It sounds to me like asking a company to hand you over a log with your phone calls and email exchanges; I don't think they have that obligation.

I think that in most (all?) European countries, a phone company is actually obliged to provide you with a detailed listing of phone calls upon request.

Re:Actually,

[Anonymous Coward]

A lot of the 800+ pages of information I briefly browsed through looked like logs to me. And as I understand it they do have that obligation in the EU. They have to hand over the data they keep about you.

I don't see how something that is not too complicated to keep can be too complicated to hand over. If they can make database queries to access the information for their own use they can make database queries to access the information to satisfy the data requests users make. They will have practical problems if they didn't prepare for it, but there are no reasons why it should be too difficult. It is not as if Facebook keeps paper archives covering decades that have to be copied manually, they have databases.

I do not think that the right to have trade secrets (the privacy rights of businesses) should overrule people's pricavy rights. While businesses are very important for society we are a society of people, not of businesses, businesses are activities people perform. If the consequence of keeping data about people is that a business can't keep some things secret and that they have to build and maintain software to satisfy the requirements then they should base their business decisions on those circumstances.

time for individual data mining

[Anonymous Coward]

As if your personal information is only valuable to big corporations. How about personal data mining? When are we going to see on-line services that actually offer something relevant, information about yourself! I'd actually be interested into my own buying habits,health friendship and emotions by generalizing over patterns of behavior of million others just like me. This would require an open standard where all your personal information is available.

Do Products Have No Rights?

[ohnocitizen]

Can someone explain why "you are the product" translates to carte blanche for facebook to do what they want with your data? If the FBI maintains a file on me, using purely public information, do I not have a right to that information? I don't understand why "you are using this for free" translates to "you deserve whatever they do to you". If Facebook charged for their service, would I suddenly be entitled to more? So do products (aka users) have zero rights? Should we?

Re:Do Products Have No Rights?

[Anonymous Coward]

If Facebook were a Dutch company, it would be severely limited by laws regarding the use of personal data (names, birthdates, gender, IQ).
But since it is an American company, it can do whatever it wants with your data.
That has to do something with operating a company in the land of the free.
You also did have a choice to allow Facebook to gather and use your data.
It's all in the agreement you were presented when creating your Facebook account.
The FBI gathers your information without your prior consent so as a means of transparent government, you also have the right to review that information.

Even if Facebook charged your for it's services, it would all depend on the type of agreement they would present you when signing up.
If it states that 'I, the iSheep, shall entrust all my deep dark secrets to Facebook to be exploited by malicious advertisers' then there isn't much else you can do than refusing to agree on the agreement.

Re:Do Products Have No Rights?

[Echoota]

Sorry this is a worthless comment, but I have to give you props; perfectly said sir.

Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Facebook says it is not required to give you a copy of some of your personal data..."

Why would you ask in the first place? What, you don't know who you are anymore?

Habeas data

[jcfandino]

In my coutry we have a constitutional right called Habeas data. I don't think there's something like this in the US constitution, unfortunately.

It states (copied from wikipedia):

“Any person shall file this action to obtain information on the data about himself and their purpose, registered in public records or data bases, or in private ones intended to supply information; and in case of false data or discrimination, this action may be filed to request the suppression, rectification, confidentiality or updating of said data. The secret nature of the sources of journalistic information shall not be impaired.”

Oh...and NoScript is block FBcdn.com...yay

[Anonymous Coward]

Just deactivated my account.

Deleting ASAP.

I'm finished with FB.

Not too sure about G+

And "Diaspora" wants $25 donations, despite what they got from Kickstarter...

Done.

For now - respect me; respect my trust; fuck

you.

Social media

PS. I love you Twitter...`

Re:Oh...and NoScript is block FBcdn.com...yay

[Larryish]

Dropped FB last year.

Haven't missed it.

Apt fortune

[dargaud]

The fortune of the day was quite on topic: "Lord, defend me from my friends; I can account for my enemies." -- Charles D'Hericault

Your Personal Data is a Trade Secret

[bytesex]

Keep telling it to Mr TSA agent.

EU privacy laws

[jopsen]

.... use of language, or friends, in order to predict certain cultural preferences, or ad susceptibility. That's perfectly believable, and no, you probably aren't entitled to it. If you don't want them building models of you, don't submit your information.

Under EU privacy laws they must, upon request, provide you with all the information they have about you. And upon request they must also delete any personal information.
If there's really anything to this story (and facebook doesn't back down), I think facebook will loose in court...

Flouting data protection laws

[Martin S.]

In the European Union personal data is protected by the Data Protection Directive, principle 6 which provides a legally guaranteed "access to private personal data" held by any third party.

Europe vs. Facebook?

[Anonymous Coward]

Europe vs. Facebook sounds like an advocacy group for people that aren't happy with Facebook but still want to use it. What's the point? A better way would be to just not use Facebook.

Re:Europe vs. Facebook?

[pakar]

not using facebook is not a good idea either... since even if you don't have an account they keep information about you... Only way to at least manage some of the privacy stuff is to have a account just to once a month go in and re-select the most private settings in the profile..

Re:Do not piss off the Austrians.

[niktemadur]

This exchange could have gone either -1 Offtopic or +5 Funny. Not quite as classic as this bad boy, but pretty funny nonetheless.

Not just Facebook...

[cardpuncher]

Despite the Data Protection Act in the UK which generally requires disclosure and correction of personal information, financial institutions routinely refuse to give out information on things like decisions to turn down credit applications on the grounds that the proprietary algorithms they use to crunch your data are trade secrets. This even extends to the data sources they have consulted in addition to the personal information you provided them.

I was on one occasion turned down for a credit card because of suspected fraud. The financial institution concerned refused to divulge the information that led them to that conclusion and the Information Commissioner sided with them because disclosing the source of the information would permit other people to circumvent their fraud checking in future and disclose part of the "proprietary algorithm" used for credit checking. Not only am I unable to correct the apparently erroneous information they have on file, but since it relates to suspected fraud, they're free to share that incorrect information with other financial institutions without telling me what it is.

The more critical the personal information someone has about you, the less likely you are to get your hands on it...

No, it's hypocrisy

[Anonymous Coward]

"I can't tell you some things I know about you because then you would know something about me." Proprietary stuff/trade secrets == corporate privacy, and I don't see why anyone who makes a business of aggressively and systematically ignoring and (as I see it) violating people's privacy on a massive scale should be entitled to any privacy themselves.

Nope

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm, nope, that still doesn't work. You don't just post random details about your personal life everywhere, there has to be the proper receptacle for that. Facebook, MySpace, Google+, etc. Those aren't the internet, they're just specific web sites.

Re:Nope

[Archangel Michael]

If you post it to the Internet, it is there for anyone and everyone to see, even if you don't want it to be. This includes ALL websites. There is no privacy on the Internet. The sooner you realize this and forget your delusions about "Privacy on Public Web Servers" the better off you will be.

Your data is still there

[HalAtWork]

Your friends are already doing it for you. They're tagging you in pictures, and writing about what you did with them, who you're with, who your friends are, and certain other details about your personal life.

Spin-off the board for God's sake...

[Anonymous Coward]

Hope they'll do away with what is really ailing this great company; get rid of the board and put in a bunch of Orangutangs.

A good thing?

[Anonymous Coward]

Companies protect their trade secrets. Also they have to take reasonable measure to protect it from disclosure/theft to consider it a trade secret. Theft becomes a federal offense (IANAL thats from my 1 hit google search so that may be a complete lie). So if personal data is a trade secret, it then receives a level of protection from the company and gov't. I.e. the system is actually working to afford protection to your data.

Someone mentioned "Keep telling it to Mr TSA agent" above. Interesting idea. I want my body scan to be a facebook trade secret so facebook is interested in sueing the TSA for obtaining that data.

So says this anonymous coward.

Data Protection Act anyone?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm pretty certain the Information Commissioner (in the UK) won't see it this way (see a summary of the DPA here: http://www.dataprotectionact.org/5.html).
There are a few exceptions to the citizen's right to access, but I don't see this is being one of them. They're legislatively muddying the waters and trying to draw this out.

that sounds good...

[pakar]

... since they are planning to build a datacenter here in sweden... And according to Swedish law you can request any and all data any company might have stored on you... =)